Taper’s Choice

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Somebody in the room will be recording this, and nobody will mind, which tells you most of what you need to know about the culture around it. The whole value proposition of a band like this is that no two nights are the same, so a recording is not a souvenir, it is evidence, and the people who collect them trade dates the way other people trade stories. That changes how a room behaves. Nobody is waiting for the hit, because there is not really one, and the long instrumental middle that would lose a normal crowd is the part these people came for. There is a particular good-natured patience to the audience that you do not get anywhere else. If you have ever been baffled by somebody describing a specific night from years ago in forensic detail, this is where that behaviour comes from, and it is a lot more charming from the inside.